Khula Project Wants to Make Privacy Policies Readable

Sep 29, 2011

Privacy policies and terms of service policies are generally so long and full of legal jargon that few users ever bother to read them. There are, of course, some notable exception to this and even Facebook, which regularly finds itself in the privacy spotlight, is making stride to improve how it communicates its policies. The average privacy policy is a mess, though. The Khula Project wants to create tools that will allow companies to write easy-to-read privacy policies, similar to what Creative Commons has done for copyright licenses.

This project – which is currently looking for funding through Kickstarter – argues that simplified privacy policies will allow cloud services to build user trust. This is definitely an ambitious project. Given their importance as legal documents, there are reasons why they are so complex and why a search for “readable privacy policies” returns more results for machine-readable than human-readable ones.

At first, Khula will work with the individual companies and will create tailor-made licenses for them at first. In the long run, though, the idea is to develop a “human-readable privacy policy creator.” This tool will then allow companies to customize their policies themselves.

Privacy Should Not Be a Complicated Issue

As the project’s founder Tyler Baird told me by email earlier this week, “Privacy should not be a complicated issue.” Right now, understanding a company’s privacy policies, however, is too complicated for most users. Hopefully this project – and others like it – will help propel the movement toward human-readable privacy policies forward.